Rome: Spanish Steps and Pincio

Edward Hutton especially liked the Spanish Steps and the nearby Pincio, Rome's beautiful and spacious park. "Eighteenth century work though it be, on how many nights one is content to find that marvelous staircase the most beautiful thing in Rome." Typically, he didn't like the crowds of tourists that just liked to sit on the steps then and now.*

The Piazza di Spagna, that beautiful, irregular square, with its strange fountain before the Palace of the Spanish embassy at the foot of the Spanish steps, remains for the English certainly, the very centre of Rome, though indeed it is just within the Aurelian wall. It is, in fact, one of the most characteristic in the modern city, Papal so long, the key, as it were, to all the strangers’ quarter which still forms so important and even so indispensable a part of the old capitol of the world….(291)

 

When coming on a winter evening along the Via Condotti we see the real beauty of Rome, a beauty really of atmosphere, of colour in the splendor which the sunset has laid upon the whole Piazza, and not least upon that stucco church whose twin towers seem to guard it from the summit of the Spanish Steps. In that fortunate hour the whole place is an acropolis of ivory and precious moonstone, stained with delicate purple and rude gold.

 

But in the twilight and the darkness when it is deserted by all, its grave, artificial lines so cunningly sumptuous, seem almost ascetic, and very quiet in their ample beauty leading one slowly, with dignity, with many well-timed pauses, to the summit. And then, too, the mere stucco of the beautiful church to which it serves as a threshold or atrium is lost in the generous beauty of night. One might think it indeed to be of marble or some precious unheard of stone, chrysoprase or amber, jasper or chalcedony, or of ivory and pallid gold. Built in 1493 by that madman, Charles VIII of France, the SS. Trinita de’ Monti has something of the ecstasy of a great French building restrained by the sanity of the sun…. (294)

 

Something of the fantastic beauty of that church which lends itself so readily to every aspect of the sky is to be found everywhere on the Pincio, which on certain afternoons is the one really gay and irresponsible place in the City, unawares so beggared. There, as it were, above the City, on a summer afternoon, amid the languid fountains, under the evergreen trees whose sharp leaves seem to be all of bronze, that trivial and tirelessly formal or weary world takes its ease, a little harshly and noisily perhaps, as Rome has always done… (294-5)

 

But it is not thus in in the afternoon or at sunset alone that the Pincio has a charm, but early in the morning too, before the sun has southed. It is almost deserted then, and the fountains whisper together in the silence in the shadow and the sun. One wanders there under the trees always returning to the look-out over the City towards S. Peter’s, lingering there for a time before descending to the Piazza del Popolo and the beautiful church of S. Mary. Out of the gate, Porta del Popolo passes the Flaminian way, and by that road our fathers came from England, S. Maria del Popolo being indeed the first Roman church they would see. (296)

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Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Note: In his extensive description of the art works in S. Maria del Popolo, Hutton did not mention the two famous paintings in the Cerasi Chapel by Caravaggio: The Crucifixion of Peter and the Conversion of Paul.